"Any fiscal policy effort to reduce unemployment will merely provoke an inflationary reaction". What you're talking about there is the SHORT-RUN Philips Curve, and it too makes PERFECT sense.

Actually I'm not. You again show your ignorance. The bastardised version of Keynesianism used the Phillips Curve to suggest some preferred unemployment-inflation combination could be chosen. The long run kack suggests that expansionary fiscal policy will be inflationary and nothing more.

When unemployment is very high, you have workers competing for scarce jobs

and many of them will be desperate enough to take lower wages. If you are currently employed, this would NOT be a good time to march into your boss's office, pound his desk, and demand a big raise; he might just point to all the unemployed people peering in the windows, hoping to get a job.

You're still grunting incoherently. We have employment rates as the means to partially determine labour bargaining power. However, I've already referred to how that can't be used within the Phillips Curve context. See, for example, Britain's high employment rate and how it is coupled with low labour bargaining. Institutional issues have to be factored in.

In contrast, when unemployment is very low, you have firms competing for scarce workers, and they may have to offer higher wages in order to get the workers they need. And this might be the time to demand a raise from your boss.

Simple. Econ 101 stuff.

And this sums up the truth! You've understood elements of Econ 101 and then pretended knowledge. That people buy your bobbins is only indicative of one thing: too much ignorance of economics.

But, if you're disputing that the LONG-RUN Philips Curve is a vertical line, then you ARE, whether you realize it or not, claiming that there IS some long-run relationship between unemployment and inflation. There's not. I just PROVED that to you, by showing you that you can get ANY combination of inflation and unemployment from looking at economic history.

I'm stating the obvious: the long run Phillips Curve doesn't give an oaf a reason to say 'yeah but, yeah but, I can refer to periods where unemployment and inflation rates were quite different' (which you've attempted). It refers to an ideological attack on the relevance of fiscal policy. As I said, you're feckin clueless over economics. Why do you fib that you teach it?

Hysteresis in unemployment IS a serious problem, and yes, it can lead to the destruction of human capital when workers remain unemployed for a long time. Europe has had far more serious problems with this than America, due to the rigidities of labor markets in Europe. But this is a completely separate issue.

More feckin cluelessness. Hysteresis doesn't reflect rigidities. It reflects how long term unemployment is generated through the lack of fiscal control.

From the link: While there is a short run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, it has not been observed in the long run.[1] In 1968, Milton Friedman asserted that the Phillips curve was only applicable in the short-run and that in the long-run, inflationary policies will not decrease unemployment.[2][3] Friedman then correctly predicted that in the 1973–75 recession, both inflation and unemployment would increase.[3] The long-run Phillips curve is now seen as a vertical line at the natural rate of unemployment, where the rate of inflation has no effect on unemployment.[4] Accordingly, the Phillips curve is now seen as too simplistic, with the unemployment rate supplanted by more accurate predictors of inflation based on velocity of money supply measures such as the MZM ("money zero maturity") velocity,[5] which is affected by unemployment in the short but not the long term.[6]

Note: This is EXACTLY what I've been trying to tell you, nimrod.

I snorted here with laughter. A pretend economist using Wikipedia? Who'd have thought?